Final moments of big tech whistleblower Suchir Balaji hours before his mysterious ‘suicide’

Hours before his death, Suchir Balaji appeared relaxed as he strolled to the door to collect his last meal.

The big tech whistleblower emerged from the elevators of his apartment building in San Francisco hungry and with a spring in his step.

He turned toward the front door and disappeared around a corner, returning 15 seconds later clutching a brown paper bag.

Inside was a box of take-out rice, meat, and vegetables – the scraps of which were found sitting on his desk when his body was found days later.

Balaji dressed casually in jeans, sneakers, and a zip-up sweater, strolled back to the elevator, pumping tunes through the wireless earbuds planted firmly in his ears.

To passersby he has the appearance of any tired, young professional ready to relax on the couch with his dinner.

Yet this newly uncovered surveillance footage obtained by DailyMail.com from 7.30pm on November 22 is believed to be the last time he was seen alive.

Just hours later he died from a single gunshot wound to the head. His body was found four days later on November 26.

The medical examiner concluded his death was a suicide. Police agree. But the young man’s parents are convinced he was the victim of foul play. 

They believe he was punished for daring to speak out against the dangers of the world-changing technology he’d been working on. 

A month earlier, Balaji had revealed OpenAI’s dubious methods of training ChatGPT and warned of its dangers to the internet. 

His mother, Poornima Ramarao, claims the final footage of her son proves he did not kill himself.

‘[The medical examiner] saw this video and still concluded he was depressed and called it suicide,’ she said.

Balaji spoke to his father, Balaji Ramamurthy, from 7.12pm until a few minutes before he arrived home.

He told him him he was getting dinner and they discussed his recent holiday, and tentative plans to meet in January.

There were no signs of what was to come. 

Earlier CCTV footage showed Balaji arriving home from his birthday holiday with friends to Catalina Island, off the coast of Los Angeles, at 1.33pm.

His luggage, a large canvas bag, hung from a strap slung over his left shoulder and he was wearing a black jacket, blue jeans, and black shoes.

Like the final video just six hours later, he was walking towards the elevators in the lobby of his apartment building.

‘Does he look stressed?’ Ramarao asked, rhetorically.

Balaji’s exact time of death remains unknown, but police and the medical examiner said he likely died on the night of November 22. 

His body was not found until four days later when a welfare check was requested by his worried parents.  

Ramarao added that security cameras in the elevator, building garage, and neighbors were not working.

‘His murder conspiracy was executed over long term planning and watching Suchir,’ she claimed.

Despite the family’s pleas, the San Francisco Chief Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed the police suicide ruling with the release of Balaji’s autopsy report last month.

The report included some shocking new findings including that Balaji was drunk and had multiple drugs including GHP in his system when he shot himself.  

The report also noted the only way into Balaji’s fourth-floor apartment number #404 was via his front door. 

‘The apartment windows are stories above the shared courtyard and street and are equipped with devices that restrict the window opening to approximately four inches,’ it read. 

‘There was no evidence of forced entry to the unit or disturbance within the unit.’

Security camera footage and key fob records also showed that no one else entered the apartment during the time he could have died.

San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott wrote a joint letter with the ME’s office to Balaji’s parents, accompanying the report, further explaining the ruling.

‘These facts, taken together, support that Mr Balaji was alone at the time of the incident,’ it read.

‘The SFPD found no evidence or information to establish that Mr Balaji died of means other than a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.’ 

Scott wrote that his investigation, along with that of the ME’s office, found ‘there is insufficient evidence to find Mr Balaji’s death was the result of homicide’.

‘We realize that this information is difficult to receive, and we extend our sincere condolences to the Balaji family,’ he added. 

‘We hope that this response may help bring some amount of closure to his grieving parents, friends and family.’

Police now consider the case closed and will only reopen the criminal investigation if there is a basis for a chargeable offense and the statute of limitations has not expired.

The autopsy report appeared to confirm one of Balaji’s parents’ claims: That the gunshot wound would not have instantly killed their son.

Instead, the bullet entered through his forehead at a downward angle and missed his brain entirely, before lodging in the back of his neck.

The autopsy report noted the bullet passed through his facial bones, skull sinuses, cervical vertebra C1, and cervicomedullary junction of the spinal cord.

Balaji’s parents argued he would have been alive for some time after he was shot and bled to death on his floor.

However, the autopsy found a medulla/high cervical spinal cord injury and a fracture of the C1 vertebra, both of which cause death if not immediately treated.

A toxicology report found Balaji had a blood alcohol level of 0.178 and amphetamine, norephedrine/norpseudoephedrine, and GHP were present in his blood.

The report concluded Balaji was an otherwise healthy young man and was wearing a white T-shirt, blue jeans, a black belt, black underwear and black socks.

Balaji’s parents claimed there was a blunt force injury to their son’s head, indicating a struggle before he was murdered, but no such injury was recorded in the autopsy.

The autopsy report also examined the gun found next to Balaji’s body, a Glock pistol that he bought on January 4, 2024, with one spent casing in the chamber.

The report noted that police found gunshot residue on both of Balaji’s hands, and his DNA on the gun. The bullet was confirmed to have been fired by that gun.

Medical examiners did not find soot and unburned gunpowder particles on the skin around the wound, which ‘may be obscured by changes of postmortem decomposition’.

Recent searches for brain anatomy including ‘Total Gray Matter Volume’ and ‘White Matter’ were found on Balaji’s desktop computer.

The report noted that the deadbolt was engaged on Balaji’s door and entry was made by the building manager. Paramedics pronounced him dead at 1.20pm.

‘Our counsel and we disagree with their decision. There are tons of inconsistencies in their decision,’ Ramarao said of the autopsy’s conclusion.

‘Underlying assumptions are not supporting the facts in reports. We continue our investigation.’

Ramarao referenced two tufts of synthetic hair found next to Balaji’s body, one of the unexplained factors she has long claimed point to foul play.

‘We have sent the hair found in apartment for testing. We are fighting for justice and [will] not back up,’ she said.

She insisted police wrote ‘inaccurate information in autopsy and police report’ when they concluded no one else could have entered his apartment.

‘They have never retrieved CCTV footage from [the] leasing office,’ she said.

Ramarao also pointed to a report revealing that none of Balaji’s neighbors were contacted by police or the medical examiner’s office during their investigation.

Their lawyer, Kevin Rooney, who is suing the city of San Francisco for the full police incident report, added that the family would continue its own probe.

Rooney said they would take up the SFPD offer to request bodycam footage and ‘any other information’ they sought, as the investigation was closed.

‘We intend to do so forthwith, because, while we appreciate receiving some of the information Suchir’s parents have asked for since his death, we believe the investigation is far from complete,’ he said.

‘We disagree both with the conclusions the city has reached and with some of the underlying assertions and assumptions upon which those are based.’ 

Balaji’s parents hired Joseph Cohen, former chief forensic pathologist of Riverside County, California, to conduct a second autopsy in December, but are yet to reveal the report. 

A lawsuit filed by Balaji’s parents, demanding the city release the police incident report and other case files to them, listed some of the results.

‘Significantly, Dr Cohen also noted a contusion to the back of Suchir’s head,’ the lawsuit detailed.

But it did not reveal the second report’s findings on whether Balaji took his own life, or if it determined another manner of death.

Photos obtained by the Daily Mail show blood was pooled next to the bathroom door where his head lay, but also splattered around the bathroom far from the body.

Lying on the bloodstains were one of Balaji’s wireless earbuds and two mysterious tufts of what appeared to be synthetic hair, like from a wig.

His home, in a high-end building on Buchanan Street, was also ransacked, ‘like someone was searching for something’.

‘After seeing there is so much blood everywhere, I don’t know how they think it’s a suicide, it doesn’t look close,’ his father, Ramamurthy, told the Daily Mail.

His apartment sits frozen in time – never cleaned, and touched as little as possible since police left it on November 26.

The family are also yet to hold a proper funeral or bury his body, instead raising $85,000 to pay lawyers, investigators, and forensic experts to prove he was murdered.

One of these experts was Professor Dinesh Rao, who wrote a preliminary report on the scene obtained by Daily Mail.

The report includes dozens of photos showing the condition of Balaji’s one-bedroom apartment, along with earlier images taken by his family.

Rao wrote that the disturbed scenes were ‘more likely seen in homicidal death scene and rarely observed in alleged suicidal cases’. 

Balaji’s parents theorize their son was attacked from behind while he was listening to music and cleaning his teeth, and his head smashed into the wall or cabinet.

After fighting back, he was pulled up onto his knees or sitting down, and shot in the head. As the wound wasn’t fatal, he survived for some minutes and got out of the bathroom before dying from blood loss.

‘A 10-minute struggle, probably,’ his father claimed.

His parents believe the apartment was ransacked because the killer was looking for a storage device that had damning evidence on it.

Balaji never expected to become a lightning rod for those wary of the emerging power of artificial intelligence – or his boss, OpenAI founder Sam Altman.

He joined the company in November 2020, having previously spent four months interning there two years while studying at UC Berkley.

But from as early as 2022 he began to question the work he was doing, training GPT-4 – the engine behind ChatGPT – with reams of data from the internet.

Balaji had justified his work by treating it like a research project, but after it was launched in late 2022 and sold commercially, he began to rethink this.

He came to the conclusion that OpenAI was grossly violating copyright laws to such an extent that it was not only illegal, but unsustainable for the internet itself.

Eventually he quit last August and wrote his findings in a detailed essay on his personal website, then spoke to the New York Times.

Balaji’s NYT interview was published on October 23, shocking his parents and even his friends – none of whom he told in advance.

Balaji told his mother not to worry – he wasn’t giving away confidential secrets, just expressing his opinion on the work, and he had enough money from his OpenAI stock.

‘He said he wasn’t looking for another job, he said he was planning to found a startup,’ his mother said.

Then a week before his death, the NYT named him as a ‘custodian witness’ in its copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.

His mother believes that implied he had more damaging information up his sleeve, and was targeted for it.

It also appeared Balaji wasn’t finished going public. 

Days after his death, his phone rang and his parents picked it up.

On the other end was an Associated Press reporter who didn’t know Balaji was dead, and was calling to schedule an interview he agreed to do.

‘Maybe he had some new information to share with AP and somebody doesn’t want that liability, so they targeted him,’ Ramamurthy said.

Balaji’s parents have three main reasons they believe he couldn’t have killed himself: the crime scene, the timing of his death after going public, and that he had too much to live for.

‘There’s no depression, he didn’t have a suicide note or anything, he was financially stable, he has a good friends circle, going around having a good time,’ his father said.

Conspiracy theories about Balaji’s death started almost immediately after it became public in news reports on December 13.

Social media provocateurs and true crime buffs quickly began sharing and debating the story, declaring that the AI industry had him killed.

The online avalanche became so intense that it reached the attention of Altman’s arch-nemesis Elon Musk.

‘This doesn’t seem like a suicide,’ he wrote when reposting one of Ramarao’s tweets, and also shared other articles and posts about the case with comments like ‘hmm’ and ‘concerning’.

Musk has had a longstanding feud with OpenAI and Altman since they refused his offer to buy them out in 2018.